Hackers auctioned Wolverine's secrets for 50 bitcoin years before the game shipped
In December 2023 a ransomware gang broke into Insomniac Games and put its files up for auction, starting at 50 bitcoin. When nobody paid, plot details, gameplay slices and even the voice cast of the unreleased Marvel's Wolverine spilled online. The studio kept going, and the game arrived in September 2026.
The project grew out of Insomniac's work on Marvel's Spider-Man in 2018. While that game was in development, the studio kept telling Sony and Marvel it wanted a turn with Wolverine, arguing that the clawed mutant shared Spider-Man's instinct to protect those who cannot protect themselves. The game was announced at a PlayStation Showcase in September 2021 alongside Spider-Man 2, pitched by creative director Brian Horton as a full-size game with a mature tone. It sits in the same fictional universe as the studio's other Marvel titles, which one director summed up as Earth-1048.
The attackers, a group called Rhysida, gave Insomniac seven days before publishing. The price they set was then worth about 2 million US dollars. After the deadline passed, employee records, model dumps and pre-production material appeared publicly, and dataminers soon circulated early playable builds. Sony responded with DMCA takedown notices, and three days after the breach Insomniac described the emotional toll on its teams as extremely distressing while insisting production would continue. Much of the games industry responded with sympathy.
Leadership then changed. Horton left to become creative director of Xbox's Perfect Dark reboot, which was cancelled when its studio closed in July 2025, and by October 2024 Marcus Smith and Mike Daly had taken over as creative and game directors. The comic artist Jock helped design the cover art.
The finished game, released for PlayStation 5 on September 15, 2026, casts Liam McIntyre as Logan, a centuries-old mutant with an unbreakable adamantium skeleton. He rejoins his old unit, Team X, to investigate the abduction of mutants by the industrialist Bolivar Trask and his cyborg militia, the Reavers, while trying to recover his own buried memories. Critics gave it generally favourable reviews.
Source: Marvel's Wolverine
